


Stepping Stones

by seekingsquake



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21855343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: Bruce can't stay at the compound, so he goes to New Asgard looking for Thor. He finds someone else instead.She shakes herself a little and then comes fully behind the desk. “I can set you up in a suite,” she says as she fiddles around on the computer, “but if you’re only here for Thor you’re going to be disappointed. He’s long gone.”Bruce is used to existing on autopilot. He pulls out his wallet and gives the woman his SI credit card, but his ears are ringing. Gone. She’s chattering away at him, and he can sort of hear his own voice responding to her. She puts his credit card back in his hand and then leads him up the stairs and to a room, and all the while Bruce is just... following. Gone. The ringing in his ears morphs to the sound of cymbals crashing, and his vision sort of tunnels in on itself, and he feels like he’s falling through a hole.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Brunnhilde | Valkyrie
Comments: 12
Kudos: 17





	Stepping Stones

**Author's Note:**

> So. This is the first thing I've written in... a really long time. I hope you enjoy.

_ Bruce. _

He’s falling back through space, his stomach rolling with the force of a tsunami, his arms flung out in front of him, his hands open-- reaching, grasping, time and everything else slipping between desperate fingers. His mother is in the distance above him, leaning over the precipice, the echo of her gasping last breaths and crimson red drops of her blood following him down into the abyss.

_ Bruce. _

The speed at which he is plummeting down, down, down is enough to leave him disoriented and breathless. He tries to grab something, anything, to slow his descent, and Betty’s hair curls around his wrists and gets in his mouth, his eyes. He doesn’t dare hold onto it too tightly for fear of hurting her. She screams his name anyway, fearful and angry and so far away. He blinks to clear his vision, and she is staring down at him with her mouth stretched open in an obscene scream. His hands are cuffed together in front of him, and he tries to reach for her, but it’s already too late. It was too late from the moment they laid eyes on each other.

_ Bruce. _

To be reckless, and always more brave than afraid. To be ruthless in the need to protect those you care about. He can’t hear anything past the rush of wind in his ears and the roaring of repulsors. A glint of gold and the red gleam of a suit of armour zipping off somewhere to his left draws his attention, and then there’s Iron Man flitting around in active defiance of every force that ever tried to keep him chained to the ground. He can almost hear Tony’s voice under the sound of death throes and anguish.  _ It’s time to strut, Big Guy. Keep up, Banner. _ He tries to claw himself away from the force of gravity, tries to go to his friend despite the sick feeling in his core that tells him it’s no use, but Tony only accelerates upward even as Bruce is dragged farther and farther down.

_ Bruce. _

There is nothing above him now. Nothing but the blackness of space spreading out indefinitely and forever. It’s too much to look at, to see out and see nothing stretching out into infinite and complete nothingness. He flips himself over because watching the ground rush up to utterly destroy him is more final and reassuring that not knowing where he came from or what he is falling towards. Still, when he looks down beneath himself, the sight is more terrible than he could have thought to imagine.

_ Bruce. _

She is lying at the bottom of a chasm, limbs limp and mangled like a marionette cut from its strings. Her skin is white as the snow that covers the Koryak mountains, and the pool of inky, ruby red that spreads out from under her head makes him want to vomit. He reaches out to break his fall because he is plummeting down right above her, and he will not land on top of her and destroy her any more than she has already been destroyed. He  _ cannot.  _ One hand, thick and green and strong, the other black with ash and thin-- scorched and charred and so weak. He snaps his fingers, but everyone he loves is still dead. He snaps his fingers, but he is still in pieces. He snaps his fingers, and he screams, and his body crumbles like a landslide. The falling rocks of himself bury Natasha, and his mother, and Tony, and Betty. He tries to say he’s sorry, but the only sound that can be heard is that of tectonic plates crunching under pressure.

*****

There’s sweat in his eyes when he wakes, and his skin is sticky and clammy. His heart is pounding rapidly, painfully, inside his chest, but he is no longer fearful of the surge of adrenaline brought on by his nightmare like he would have been before.

His head has been quiet in his waking moments for years now. He doesn’t find as much comfort in the silence as he used to believe that he would. 

After the world was destroyed, and then saved, and then plunged into war and saved again, Bruce had stayed on the compound for only a few days before he couldn’t stand it anymore. He would wake up in the middle of the night and roam the halls, but whenever he passed by the central office, he would swear that he’d catch a glimpse of red hair over the desk. He would wander into the labs and hear the faint sounds of AC/DC breaking through the soundproofing, but if he peeked in through the viewing window, the lights would be down, and all the screens were dark. Everyone else had gone; they all had families to go back to or a renewed sense of duty that needed to be pursued, but Bruce...

Bruce could only handle drifting through the corridors, caught somewhere between haunting the compound and being haunted by it, for so long. 

His family has been gone since he was a child. Most of his friends are dead. There’s only one person he can think of who wouldn’t turn him away who he could maybe bear to be around. And so for the past few months, he has slowly been meandering his way across the country towards New Asgard. Towards Thor.

******

Riding into the small seaside town in the bed of a pickup provokes a sense of deja vu that Bruce hadn’t quite been prepared for. He and Hulk have been integrated for some amount of time now, but the thoroughness and depth at which he can experience emotions now, unabashedly and without fear, still catches him off guard almost daily. The breeze tastes of salt and is rough in his hair, but he is warm in his giant fleece jacket. He hops out of the truck when it pulls up to the pier in the centre of town. He nods and smiles at all the people who look at him with recognition in their eyes. 

The landscape is rocky and grey, the sky and the sea and even the earth all sort of blending together. It is both bleak and beautiful, and Bruce takes a deep breath as he stares off into the horizon. He doesn’t know where exactly he needs to be, but even now, New Asgard is a small fisherman’s village. There are signs that indicate a thriving tourism industry in warmer months-- gift shops, cozy cafes, a wooden boardwalk along the edge of the coastline, but little to indicate a large year-round population. He may not yet know where he needs to go, but he’s confident that who he’s looking for won’t be hard to find.

There’s a small inn at the top of a hill, overlooking both the ocean and the entirety of the village. Now that he’s here, there’s a weariness in Bruce’s bones that he'd been ignoring that is almost overcoming him. A place to drop off his bag and grab a cup of coffee seems as good a place to start as any.

He doesn’t have to duck his head to get through the door, which is both novel and familiar for him. A little bell tingles as he enters, and a voice rings out from a room off to the right. “Hang on just a second, I’ll be right there!”

Bruce takes three steps into the lobby and up to the front desk. He wants to sag against it like he might have done when he was small and pink and travelling the world anonymously, but now he doesn’t dare. On the tabletop, there is a computer, an electric glass kettle that is half full of water, and a small fern in a pot. The leaves are a deep green colour, and the part of him that is still  _ Hulk _ wants to see if it’s the same as his skin.  _ Bruce  _ would never, and so he keeps his hands shoved firmly into the front pocket of his hoodie. 

“Sorry,” a woman huffs as she comes towards the desk from the back room. “I was just--” she stops when she sees Bruce, and her head tilts just a little to the left.

“Can I get a room?” Bruce asks. He smiles at her invitingly. Children are rarely afraid of him, but sometimes he catches adults off guard. “I was also wondering where I could catch Thor.”

She shakes herself a little and then comes entirely behind the desk. “I can set you up in a suite,” she says as she fiddles around on the computer, “but if you’re only here for Thor, you’re going to be disappointed. He’s long gone.”

Bruce is used to existing on autopilot. He pulls out his wallet and gives the woman his SI credit card, but his ears are ringing.  _ Gone.  _ She’s chattering away at him, and he can sort of hear his own voice responding to her. She puts his credit card back in his hand and then leads him up the stairs and to a room, and all the while, Bruce is just... following.  _ Gone.  _ The ringing in his ears morphs to the sound of cymbals crashing, and his vision sort of tunnels in on itself, and he feels like he’s falling through a hole.

When he manages to calm himself, he’s standing alone in the middle of a quaint bedroom. There are little chocolate mints on the pillows, and he can see a clawfoot tub through the open door to the ensuite. He manages to make it to the bed before deflating, and as he lies there, all he can think about is the fact that he’s too late. Thor’s... gone. Just like everyone else. He was too late, again, like always. 

******

There’s a group of locals at the bar, drinking aggressively and cheering over a hockey game, but otherwise, the pub is empty. Bruce has sequestered himself in a back booth with a glass of root beer and a plate of nachos that he hasn’t touched, staring vacantly at the worn-out pleather of the bench across the table form him. The bartender has tried to check on him a couple of times, but Bruce has waved her off each time. 

He’s so out of it that he almost doesn’t even notice when someone slides into his booth, right into his line of vision. He makes note of long, dark hair in a braid, of warm, dark skin and big, round eyes. And when he speaks, he’s afraid that the sound of his voice will make her evaporate right in front of him. “Valkyrie?”

He wants to cry. He doesn’t know her fucking name.

She studies him seriously for a moment, and then she calls out, “Hey, Iris, can I get a drink over here?”

“Comin’ up, Boss,” the bartender calls back.

“You own the pub?”

Valkyrie snorts at him derisively but then seems to realize that Bruce was inquiring honestly. Then she laughs at him. “No! I’m the... mayor? Thor made me king before he--,”

One of Bruce’s hands clenches into a fist beside his plate. “When was the memorial?”

“Holy fuck,” Valkyrie mutters. She closes her eyes. “No wonder everyone who has seen you said you were moping. Thor’s not dead, you idiot. He’s just off-world with the Guardians.”

The room moves around him as if he was standing in the center of a kaleidoscope. Iris drops a pint off in front of Valkyrie before moving back to the bar. The fingers of his clenched fist ache. The relief coursing through his system is suffocating.  _ Gone  _ doesn’t always mean dead. Sometimes it just means  _ away.  _

Even after being integrated for this long, sometimes his emotions still feel too big. 

“Oh,” he manages after an eternity. 

A small, brown hand drops down over his fist. He stares at it for a long time before he finally loosens his fingers. When he finally looks back at her, there’s something soft in her expression. 

******

It’s nearly three in the morning. He’s curled up in the bed in his room at the inn, the blankets pulled up and tucked under his chin, his bleary eyes stuck on the digital clock on the bedside table. He is sober and sleep-deprived, numb and cold and sad, too exhausted to fall asleep. But Thor is alive, somewhere. 

******

The beach is all rock, boulders, driftwood. There is no sand, but Bruce doesn’t mind. He finds a large log washed nearly up to the retaining wall, and he sits there to watch the ocean. It’s cold, but he’s in a sweater and a windbreaker, and the gamma keeps his blood warm, so he’s comfortable. The water is grey and white, and so is the sky, and so are all the pebbles at his feet. The world is monochrome here, but that’s better than the red of blood and the black of the endless void in his nightmares. 

Valkyrie picks her way across the beach carefully to where he is. She’s bundled up in a purple parka with fur lining the hood, a wool scarf wrapped around the bottom of her face and zipped into her coat, and mittens knitted from rainbow coloured yarn. “Mind if I sit?” she asks when she gets to his log.

She’s always been rough around the edges, kind of sharp. He remembers that from before he Integrated, remembers their time together as if looking through a photo album. She seems smoother now, somehow. He doesn’t look at her even as he nods, and when she sits, she leaves enough space between them that someone else could sit there.

He wonders where Thor is.

“How’ve you been?” Her voice is the same as ever. New Asgard is just the same as it was the last time he was here, and the people seem to be similarly unchanged. It’s a comfort somehow when everything and everyone else Bruce knows has become nearly unrecognizable. When he still doesn’t know exactly who he’s looking at when he looks in a mirror. 

He can’t bring himself to plainly answer her question. He says, “I was living at the compound,” and that must be answer enough because Valkyrie grimaces. “Hey, uh. What’s your name now?”

For a beat, there’s only silence between them. And then she laughs. It’s a little muffled by her scarf, but it’s startling and comforting just the same. “Everyone around here calls me Boss. But uh. Brunnhilde. You can call me Brunnhilde. How about you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.” He can tell she’s smiling. “We haven’t really talked since--,” she waves a hand at him. “Hulk? Bruce? Something else?”

It takes him a minute to register what she’s saying to him. Since it happened, no one really asked him what... what his name was. “Uh. Bruce.” He wonders if his voice cracked. He had spent the time since Integrating just... responding to whatever people who knew him had been calling him. “Bruce is what... my mother used to call. Us. Me. Bruce is--,”

“It’s okay,” Valk--Brunnhilde cuts him off. “I get it.”

She’s staring out at the water, and he follows her lead. He doesn’t know anything of her life before, except for what little Thor had told him way back when. He thinks if anyone knows anything about taking back a name, it’s probably her. 

“I might... stay a while,” Bruce hears himself say.

“Good,” Brunnhilde says back. Then she reaches out and puts her rainbow covered hand on his arm and gives him a little push. A friendly gesture. It’s been a while since he’s experienced something like that; most of his friends are dead. Then, as if she can hear his thoughts, she murmurs, “Don’t let the ghosts follow you here.”

******

Bruce goes to the pub for dinner, and when he gets there, Brunnhilde is sitting in the back booth that he favours. Her back is against the wall, and her legs are stretched out lengthwise over the rest of the seat, her boot-clad feet hanging out into the aisle. Her eyes are glazed, and when she looks at Bruce, she looks through him instead.

He slides in across from her without saying a word. 

Eventually, Iris drops off a soda and a plate of nachos for him, because he always orders the same thing. She also leaves another drink for Brunnhilde, as well as a giant bowl of cashews. When she goes back to the bar, Bruce decides he’s had enough of the silence. “Wanna talk about it?”

“I thought I was done letting people leave me behind,” she spits. There’s anger in her voice, but her face stays emotionless, like a mask. 

“Honestly? Same.”

Finally, finally, she looks at him. “You really needed him to be here, hey?”

“Yeah.”

She sighs, then takes a swig of her drink. “Me too.”

******

Sometimes these nights happen. Brunnhilde gets drunk, and then she convinces Bruce to get drunk, and then they end up back at his room at the inn, telling each other battle stories and jokes and memories that they may have made up until they pass out. Bruce always wakes up in bed, while Brunnhilde always ends up somewhere strange. The floor, under the bed, the bathtub, in the closet. One time he found her asleep on top of the receptionist desk downstairs. 

Always he sleeps peacefully, and always he wakes up naturally when the sun rises with no hangover but the desperate need to piss. 

This time is the first time, though, where he’s had his nightmare. He’s falling through the void, and everyone he’s ever loved, everyone who he’s failed, slip out of his fingers no matter how hard he tries to hold on to them. And then he wakes up. There are tears in his eyes, sliding down his face, and Brunnhilde is straddling him, shaking him, saying, “Wake up, wake up, wake up,” over and over again.

It’s not quite dawn. 

He pushes her off and turns away from her, embarrassed, but he still can’t help but lean into her touch when she hesitantly starts to run her fingers through his hair. “Ghosts?” she whispers.

His emotions are so big. He still doesn’t really know how to contain them. He nods. Then, because he can’t help it and everything is numb and hurts all at the same time, he says, “I want to follow them.”

Her fingers clench in his hair, and it stings just a little. “Don’t.” She sounds firm, maybe even pissed off. But she drapes herself over his shoulder as if to keep him from floating away, and that action is anything but angry. He trembles just a bit.

******

“I want to leave the inn.”

Brunnhilde blinks, and he feels like a door’s just been slammed in his face. “Fine.” She turns towards the ocean, clearly done with this conversation and with Bruce himself.

But he’s not done just yet. “What’s the real estate like out here?”

Her shoulders loosen just a fraction. She doesn’t look at him again just yet, but her voice sounds a little bit like a door opening up. “There’re a couple places on the other side of the hill, I think, by the dock.”

They’re standing close enough together that he can drop an arm over her shoulders, so he does. 


End file.
